Have you ever needed the very last card on a Checklist - to complete that Checklist?
That's the unusual predicament I found myself in 'round about a year ago, when I set out on my way, not to Lodi, but to finally reach the summit of a long-desired collecting goal: completing the 2011 Topps Lineage '75 Minis.
That sweet Koufax card you see there is not the last card on that particular Checklist; rather it is card #1 in Lineage, a Topps product which became "Archives" in 2012. I quite like this particular Koufax card; although this particular image has possibly/probably been re-used somewhere along the 14 years of way since I obtained it, it hasn't been re-used on any Koufax cards that have appeared in any packs for me. That's something that is not true about various other Koufax cards I have randomly obtained over the years.
I also like that the Spring Training backdrop here might indicate a bit of historical accuracy in Topps long-running habit of posing 21st Century Dodgers along or in front of a vegetated area, as seen on many Heritage and Archives cards in the 2010s.
Fortunately I have owned the Koufax card perhaps ever since Lineage first appeared on shelves in front of me; a delightful discovery back in 2011, to see those oh-so-soothing 1975 Topps colors on brand new Baseball Cards, at a time when their re-appearance in Heritage was still 13 years away. As soon as I unexpectedly found one in a pack, I knew I would be collectin' em all, just as Topps has directed me to do, all my life, essentially.
However what I did not expect was just how many Baseball Cards I would discover I quite wanted to collect, from 2011 onwards. Which was a great thing — except for how difficult it then became to complete these purdy '75s. So many cards, so little time.
Thus the Lineage 'minis project sputtered along in fits and starts; eventually no more dusty blasters or hanger packs could be found with a discount sticker in various Big Box stores. I even obtained a fair amount of Lineage cards in a few different K•Marts in my travels. Rain Man would be proud. Sorta.
Once ripping packs was no longer an option I would occasionally pick up a lot of these minis on eBay, and I was able to complete one great trade for about a dozen ticks off the want list. But eventually they rarely appeared on the Bay and most people with an interest in these were far less lazy about completing this than I was being.
That left the great repository of every trading card ever issued, COMC. Or, almost every trading card. On COMC the inventory of these minis, in my memory, has been as high as 160-some cards in the 200 card Checklist. But by early 2024 that # was down to about 140-some, and I still needed a dozen of them. (It is currently down to about 130 available.)
With the imminent major Christmas Eve for 1975 Topps fans at this time last year, I thought interest in the Lineage versions would pick up noticeably during the '24 card/Baseball season, so at long last I "got going," and pulled the trigger on the dozen-ish cards still on my want list there, even paying $10-ish for one of them. Gasp!
And I promptly, missed. COMC didn't have 4 of the cards I needed.
It was time to man-up a little and tackle another long-time, and annoying, entry on the Baseball Card To Do list: navigating the buyer interface on Sportlots. Which has improved some over the years, but is still not quite there yet, particularly if you go many months between shopping expeditions on that site and forget the little tricks you figured out last time you visited.
That left just one card: #200, Tom Seaver - Mets. The very last one. A quirk of the Lineage checklist is that a few players have multiple cards on it, on different teams in Tom Terrific's case.
No problem, it's just one card. ¿Si?
Nope. Problem.
I scoured all the usual electronic exchanges, all the time. One day, I thought I had a "Eureka" moment of not going to a Baseball Card website, first, but rather simply trying a search in the ever ubiquitous Google search box. And, it worked!
Instantly, laziness returned. I simply left open the window offering me a copy for sale and got back to working all day, every day, all over the state of Michigan.
Several weeks later a little free time for Baseball Cards appeared. When I prepared my credit card for the triumphant purchase, I finally noticed the big flaw in that tab I had saved. At the bottom it said "Quantity Available: 0." Yup - Zero. Curses! (There were a lot of those.)
The card could not be found. Even worse, I read an online comment about it: "it took me over a year to track down a copy of that darn Seaver card to complete my set."
Fear - the mind killer - was setting in.
What if ... Lineage card #200 was one of those cards placed on a corner of a sheet, and then the fork lift at the printing plant hit a great big stack of the freshly printed sheets, and the vast bulk of them had to be left out of the product, creating an un-announced, un-planned but very real "Short Print." Noooooooooo!!!!
At least I had card #1 already, so there wouldn't be some ghost of Andy Pafko haunting this simple seeming collecting goal.
I tried increasingly unusual ways to look for this card, such as typing "Tom Seaber" into search windows. Nothing was working.
Finally, finally, you won't be too surprised about what happened. One day back in January after a long day at work I sat down and opened the eBay app. And there 'twas:
What a relief.
Although I like that the 2011 Topps Lineage Checklist editor neatly book-ended the set with 2 of the most famous Pitchers of the 20th Century, this isn't my favorite Tom Seaver card. That would be the 1976 Topps '75 Highlights card, surely the most intense "Look-In" card ever issued.
Now at last I can dive into a quite delightful activity:
A long-awaited sight.
Is there any set that seems more designed to be enjoyed on a 9 pocket page than 1975 Topps? Such things didn't exist, back in 1974, when the concept was created, but it sure works out niiiiiiice.
Seeing this makes me realize, some ten years later, how 2015 Topps is a sly bit of homage to the colorful king of Baseball Card design, some 40 years prior. And how much I am now looking forward to this very same task with those now ten year old cards, something which might hove into view later in 2025, I hope.
An interesting thing about this page of cards involves the two famous Yankees - Jeets, & The Mick - who wore uniforms #2, & #7, respectively. 2013 Topps is the set most known for using a player's uniform # as their card #, but the idea was planted here, two years before. Jackie Robinson is card #42 in this, for example. However there may not be more than those 3 instances of the concept.
And yeah, that page there indicates I have a stash of the 'minis sized pages, carefully held until this wonderful day. "Careful" has been a routine adjective in this too-long project, as these cards chip pretty easily if you even look at them wrong. I am the farthest thing from a condition-sensitive collector, usually. But with these, I wanted them to look as nice as possible when they finally slid into their permanent little plastic bed, forever and ever. So all handling, sorting, etc., has been done in a bit of Baseball Card slo-mo over the years.
That's a mostly respectable group of 9 Baseball players, though today I don't have the same amount of respect for Carlos Beltran as i might have back in 2011. This was the first set of Baseball Cards I had ever seen that mixed current every-day players & Hall-of-Famers with...
Who?
That's one of the "Rookie" cards in the set, although the now classic logo was left off the 'minis despite appearing on the full-sized Lineage cards.
Other notable Rookies in the set include Aroldis Chapman, Chris Sale,
&, This Guy -
Altogether, Topps somewhat restrained themselves here by only including a dozen Rooks.
I expect there might be some checklists in the '00s decade that tried this now de rigueur mixing of GOATs and RCs, but if so they likely would have been insert checklists at the most.
This is not a practice I am a particular fan of, though it is not all that turrible, just turrible in Lineage as it can be in some more recent Checklist creations.
So over the years since I have determined on a personal remedy for avoiding things like placing a card for Tsuyoshi Nishioka's 233 career MLB At Bats directly next to a Whitey Ford Baseball Card. Which is to just simply re-arrange the checklist on my binder pages in a certain way:
This is how the regular portion of my Lineage collection will appear, in the binder — the players actually playing in 2011 will be all together, probably with the Rookies just left in the same Checklist sequence. On such a small Checklist I would rather not see teams together when so many teams would have so few representatives, and I do otherwise enjoy the random approach to Checklist construction.
That leaves a decision to make for the retired players - randomly sequenced, or ?
If not using the Checklist order, one could go with date of Debut, or date of Last Game. I chose the latter -
This pleases me.